JPMorgan Chase Tests Debt Issuance on Blockchain

JPMorgan Chase & Co have collaborated with the National Bank of Canada, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Pfizer Inc and Legg Mason Inc’s to test debt issuance on a new blockchain platform. Reuters reported that the trial included financial instruments and provided the companies with an opportunity to facilitate fast and efficient payment-related processes.

Quorum, a distributed ledger and smart contract platform built by JPMorgan in 2016, was used to create the new platform a year ago. The National Bank of Canada’s Senior Vice President of artificial intelligence, David Furlong, said, “Blockchain-related technologies have the potential to bring about major change in the financial services industry.” Even CEO Jamie Dimon, who has changed his views on Bitcoin from time to time, has claimed that he strongly believes that blockchain technology has a lot of potential and that it is “real”.

According to Umar Farooq, JPMorgan’s head of blockchain initiatives of corporate and investment bank, the company might split off from Quorum due to increased interest from other organizations. He added that “it was taking too much time to field requests for help from users at other companies.” However, they have only discussed the matter without any practical implementation. “We haven’t really seen a lot of really large scale things go into production yet. There are few cases where blockchain can really shine,” said Farooq.

Interestingly, last month, sources claimed that the company was planning on making Quorum a separate entity. Official spokesperson Brian Marchiony said that they, “continue to believe distributed ledger technology will play a transformative role in business, which is why we are actively building multiple blockchain solutions … Quorum has become an extremely successful enterprise platform even beyond financial services and we’re excited about its potential.”

Earlier this month, JPMorgan was sued by a customer who reported that the bank had been charging surprise fees on cryptocurrency transactions.